Little Wrecks

by Meredith Miller

  She lays her coat on the grass and kneels down so Isabel can get on her shoulders. Isabel weighs more than Henry, but less than the world.

  It turns out none of the robbery is hard at all. The bathroom window is over the toilet, so she can climb down onto it, and the kitchen door comes right open. The weed is under the bed, but it’s obvious there is nowhere near three pounds. Charlie was right; Matt’s an amateur. They’ve brought one of those little army day packs and Ruth made them swear they’d only take what they could fit in there. When the army backpack is full, there’s still a saltines tin full of Thai stick left for Matt.

  “We are the world’s dumbest thieves,” Isabel says.

  “No, we’re sensible and humane, woman. Don’t you forget it. Anyway, this is our insurance. He’ll be less pissed off, more confused, and less likely to believe it isn’t one of his friends.”

  “This is kind of meaner than I thought, though, Magda. You know, pitting friends against each other.”

  “So, in the middle of me executing your plan, you get a conscience.” That’s Isabel all over.

  They’re in the living room looking for more stuff when the doorbell rings. Isabel jumps and crouches down on the floor.

  “It completely fine,” Magda says into her ear. “They can’t come in.”

  “Um . . . if it’s Charlie, he’s just checking. He’ll be inside in a minute.”

  Magda waves an arm towards the kitchen hallway and starts crawling. Hopefully Isabel will have the sense to follow her. Once she’s out of sight of the front windows, she stands up and Isabel runs into her. They flatten their backs against the wall and Isabel breathes big shallow breaths like she just came up from underwater.

  “It was always gonna happen,” Magda whispers. “You’re the one who said it. He’s a dealer and it’s nine thirty on Friday night. Relax.”

  A car drives away and Isabel’s breathing slows down, but they still wait fifteen minutes before they shut the bathroom window and pull the kitchen door to behind them. The best place for the stash is Magda’s house; they all agreed on that. Isabel’s mom might go anywhere in Castle Gloom, stashing candy and hiding behind furniture, that’s for sure. And Ruth’s house is smaller and already full of pot. Somehow that makes it seem like someone at Ruth’s would find this, too.

  They stand for a minute in Magda’s driveway, looking at the carriage house. The hayloft door, high in the wall, gapes at them. When Magda’s mother was still here, she encouraged the barn swallows by leaving that door open. It still lets the swallows in and out and they still nest up there. If her father ever bothers to notice, he’ll probably shut it, just out of spite.

  The first time Magda was left in charge of Henry, while her mother took an afternoon bath, they spent the time lying on their backs in the driveway, watching the orange bellies of the birds flying in and out. She was worried about taking care of him at first. She knew right then she could never be like her mother, all womanly and beautiful and reading poetry and giving out hugs that smelled like lilies. She wasn’t made like that. Henry might get broken if she was left in charge of him. But he didn’t, and she remembers the miracle of that, her and Henry both safe on the ground, with the swallows flashing over them.

  It’s pitch dark in the carriage house now, and they can’t risk turning on the light. Magda covers the window with a blanket and turns on a big flashlight. The battery is weak, and there is only just enough light to see by.

  “My dad will never look in these boxes, on principle. They are the pile of his denial. If you asked him he’d tell you he doesn’t care about any of it and one day he’ll just throw a match in here. It sure seems to piss him off, for something he doesn’t think about.”

  “If I ever get as uptight as our parents,” Isabel says, “just shoot me, okay? I mean, someone breaks your heart, why not just cry about it and be depressed for a while? That’s normal, isn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t his idea,” Magda says. “That’s what pisses him off. He didn’t think of it; he wasn’t in charge. She slipped out from under him and took off.”

  “Well, it’s like you said the other day. You can’t call her a bad role model, can you?”

  “Nope. Hey, look, it’s my granddad when he was a teenager.” Magda lifts a picture off the top of one of the boxes. There are a bunch of young people barefoot in a big round wooden tub, covered in dappled shade.

  “What are they doing?” Isabel grabs the picture and tilts it at the light.

  “Stomping grapes, man. It was this annual festival or something. Every year everyone in the town takes their shoes off and climbs in the giant barrel and stomps on the first grapes. For luck, like. Nono said it turns your feet purple for days. My dad hates all that stuff. His friends would probably call these people dagos. He won’t admit it, but he’s embarrassed that we’re related to them.”

  “I say again, why so uptight?” Isabel says. “Your granddad looks cool.”

  “Yeah, they had heart, those two, but my dad’s never gonna get that. It’s all about keeping a face on for him. Mr. Intellectual with the cable-knit sweaters from Scotland, pretending he’s all about the deeper meaning.”

  “Okay,” Isabel says, “this is what I don’t get, though. Wasn’t that exactly what made him fall in love with your mom? I mean, people are different from each other. They get fascinated; they have this awe and respect for each other. Then what happens?”

  “Fear and need, man. That’s what takes over. My dad is, like, the biggest coward on the planet.”

  Isabel whistles. “Wow, he does a really good job hiding it.”

  “Wait, let me show you this.” Magda moves some boxes. “It’s at the bottom ’cause it’s one of the first things he threw out.”

  Her mother’s wedding dress. She holds it up over her trench coat.

  “Check out the Dior silhouette, man. It only came down to her ankles and she had these way cool shoes with beads on them. There’s about forty layers of tulle under here. Some nuns in Calabria made the lace. They do this amazing thing with threads tied to all their fingers. When you go there, the old ladies are all sitting on their porches doing it.”

  “Stomping grapes and making lace,” Isabel says. “I like these people. Maybe we should go there.”

  “Apparently, my parents had this big thing ’cause my mom was supposed to wear a satin bag for all of her relatives to stuff money into at the reception. That’s how they do in Calabria. My dad wouldn’t let her ’cause he thought it was tacky. So instead, at the reception they all just stuffed hundred-dollar bills in my dad’s pockets and he stood there looking really uptight and not knowing what to do. My mom used to laugh so hard when she told that story.”

  Other boxes have running shoes in them that Mrs. Warren has obviously never worn, and cookbooks that tell you how to make food from India and Greece. There is a brand-new sewing machine and a brand-new exercise bicycle. And there are more family photographs of the Buonvicinos.

  “Why doesn’t your uncle Tony take this stuff?” Isabel waves a handful of old black-and-white pictures.

  “Uncle Tony doesn’t come here anymore. He can’t handle any of it, couldn’t handle it when Mom was here and can’t handle the fact that she left. I haven’t seen him in two years.”

  “I only met him once,” Isabel says, “but I liked him. He was fun. And he seemed like he was obsessed with you and Henry. It’s weird he doesn’t visit you.”

  “I think there’s some man thing between him and my dad, you know, because of what my dad’s like to my mom and me. So, you know, he won’t do anything about it and he’d rather just pretend it isn’t happening at all. I don’t know. When Nona died Tony expected my mom to step in and start delivering casseroles every Sunday, so he could pretend he didn’t want them and call her overbearing. Instead she went to Mexico to have a good time. I bet he just can’t figure out why she would do that.”

  “Right,” Isabel says. “Let’s put it in the dress.”

  “What? Oh, yeah
!”

  There is a reason why Magda is friends with Isabel. For doling out poetic justice, you need a poet. So she wraps Matt Kerwin’s pound of Colombian buds up in her mother’s wedding dress and puts it back underneath the cookbooks, piling a few boxes of shoes and exercise clothes on top.

  They stand side by side for a long minute, looking at the mounds of things hulking in the dark and feeling satisfied. Finally, the purpose of all this stuff has been revealed.

  “Check it out.” Magda stands aside and sweeps an open palm like the lovely assistant on Let’s Make a Deal. “The wreckage of a woman’s life.”

  “Yeah,” Isabel says, “or it’s just the cocoon she shed before she transformed herself and flew away.”

  “Call me sentimental, but I like to think she didn’t have a choice about dumping me.”

  “No, I don’t mean that, Magda. I mean, you know, from before you get your period even, guys are just sticking their hands in your clothes and pushing you up against walls. When are you supposed to have time to catch your breath and make an actual decision? By the time you can, you got at least two babies.”

  “You think it was like that for them, too? Weren’t our mothers and their friends more protected and shit? Their parents kept them inside.”

  Isabel laughs. “Yeah, they kept ’em inside with their uncles and the local priest for a nice visit every so often.”

  “Right, but I mean, my mother didn’t seem broken. She seemed stuck, but not broken.” This is the thing Magda can’t figure out. It’s her weak spot. If either of them is ever going to be like Magda’s mother, it’s Isabel, not her.

  “They got out of their parents’ houses and married husbands who wanted them to pretend not to want to fuck,” Isabel says. “Wife or whore, and all that crap.”

  “Are we still talking about my mother?”

  “Probably.” Isabel turns and looks a faraway look out the carriage house door. “Who knows? You know what? I gotta go. There’s something I have to do.”

  “At one in the morning?”

  “Yep,” Isabel says. “It only just came to me. This is the perfect time.”

  Magda stands amid the boxes, watching Isabel’s retreating shadow. Sometimes, it seems like her life is full of other people’s discarded things. Discarded antique clothes, discarded house, discarded dad, discarded brother. Would it really be so much like death, living in a prefab little box house that no one else has ever lived in before? Maybe it would just feel clean.

  thirteen

  WHEN ISABEL GETS to the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot there are enough shadows. Only two cars and a motorcycle, but there are places to hide, places where you can’t be seen from the wall of plate glass that faces the road. It’s been dark for hours and there are hours of darkness left.

  It will be a long wait. Isabel spends the time focusing, sharpening herself down to a fine point. It’s good to be full of potential, of something real about to happen at last.

  Someone has been leaking oil. The parking space where she crouches behind an old Chevy II smells strong. In the daytime it might make her feel sick, but tonight she sucks it right in. This is the kind of air she will breathe now, dirty and strong and explosive, like it’s the fuel for dragon’s breath. The Chevy throws a boxy shadow big enough for Isabel to crouch in and still see the end of the counter inside. There are two strangers and three vets from the hospital. Vicky moves in and out of sight behind the counter, emptying ashtrays and fending them all off with a vacant smile. When Isabel’s legs start to fall asleep, she sits on the curb close to the front wheel and stretches her feet out in front of her. The piece of copper pipe she’s been holding makes an echoing clang when she drops it on the ground under her legs. No one is there to hear it; the world behind the glass is a dumb show.

  He is there, the one with the spider fingers and the napalm jacket. If she waits, he will leave alone through the parking lot. Everything will happen the way she saw it, flashing suddenly into her head while she stood there in Magda’s carriage house. She leans her head against an aluminum fencepost, tilting it up towards the stars. They can’t be seen now, anyway, through the dull orange glare bouncing off the sky. She has to take it on faith that they’re up there at all.

  The other two vets leave first. She shuffles closer to the side of the Chevy and breathes as they go past, soaking in the slow smell of oil until their voices fade.

  “I gave it away,” one of them says. “It wasn’t just me. John the Jock brought back a finger. Ask him.”

  Then silence. The cars have dwindled down to one every ten minutes by the time he comes out. And yes, he walks right past her, heading for the tear in the chain-link fence. Heading for the woods and the streets behind Ruth’s house, but he doesn’t get there.

  She doesn’t have to think. She just lets her body do what she has already seen it doing, swings the pipe first at the back of his knees. He goes down so easily it startles her, drops to his knees and twists his body around to see what hit him. When he sees that it’s her, his look of fear turns into disdain.

  “What are you doing, you crazy little bitch?”

  Even someone so broken he can’t tell which part of his life is real knows how to say that. He doesn’t even have to try not to be scared of her. It passes across his face as fast as instinct, as soon as he sees that she’s a girl.

  She hits him again, on the side of his head this time. There is a soft kind of thwack. His body twists around and he falls onto his ass, but he has grabbed the pipe. She can feel the physical strength of him on the other end of it, so much greater than hers. Anger now, but still no fear, still not the look she wants to see in his eyes. Then the eyes go cloudy and his grip loosens, just for a second.

  She twists the pipe out of his hand and hits him again, aiming for the same place. For a weird moment she imagines him like a bruised apple, rotten surfaces and parts of him gone soft. No good for eating. He holds his head in one hand, his elbow in the oil slick on the asphalt, still looking up at her. Afraid at last.

  “Crazy little bitch,” he says again. But it doesn’t sound the same.

  Now there is fear coming off him in waves; adrenaline mixes with the petroleum air. Isabel takes a long breath, soaking it in. He gasps quietly now, his body moving rhythmically inside his jacket. Everything else freezes. The road behind them is silent. The people left at the counter inside mime their actions behind glass under the invisible stars. The world has telescoped down into this one shadow. Inside it are the two of them, breathing.

  Once Isabel feels full up with fear and power, she takes a long, last breath and time starts up again. One more swing and his head drops.

  Turning her back, she steps through the hole in the fence and heads into the woods. The copper pipe falls from her hand into the scrub and she keeps walking, into the scratchy darkness between the trees. Behind her there are two dark stains on the asphalt, blood seeping into oil in the shadows.

  fourteen

  RUTH’S MOM SAYS Matt should take the flag home. Danny keeps lifting it out of the eighteenth hole and putting it back in. He is doing an imitation of Neil Armstrong, walking like he’s wearing enormous boots and there’s hardly any gravity and saying some patriotic shit in a scratchy radio voice. It isn’t that funny, but Matt and her mom are laughing their asses off.

  They have blankets, but Ruth has wrapped herself up in a wool Salvation Army cape, blue on the outside with red lining. Her mom has limits on how much pot and booze she can have, but there’s no limit on the weird hippie food. She has hummus and tabbouleh for days. Lots of food and a little raspberry cordial have made Ruth feel dreamy and happy, even with Danny here. He’ll be gone soon, one way or another.

  The grass on the green is like a cop’s haircut, every blade measured to exactly the same length. While Danny steps over her, doing his Neil Armstrong, Ruth is working her way through one of her earliest memories. It’s been bothering her all night. There was a day when she played outside with Magda while her mom cleaned f
or Mrs. Warren. They were really little, way before Henry was born. They were in the carriage house, where it was always dark and dusty. The air was gritty and comforting, and Ruth loved the loft door. There was no hayloft anymore, just that door. It had long iron hinges and swung open a square of light, up high in the front wall. Doors were for stepping through. When she was really little she imagined there must have once been people who could step through that door without falling and just float away, walking through the air. Later, she figured it out about gravity and the hayloft. Fall from grace.

  They used to lie on their backs in there, watching the birds fly in and out, chattering. The straw of the birds’ nests stuck out on either side of the rafters. Magda said birds could spit glue, that’s how they made the nests stay up there. That might have been later, when she said that. On this day, one of them stumbled in the brightness coming out of the carriage house door, and fell into the gravel on the driveway.

  This is the thing, she can’t remember whether it was her or Magdalene. She can picture the knee and the red spot with the stone in the middle. It wasn’t stuck on; it was flush with the surface of the skin. That made her feel sick. Skin wasn’t supposed to do that with things. There was a kind of inside/outside thing about it that made her want to throw up. They didn’t want to cry or tell anyone because they weren’t allowed in the carriage house by themselves. In their little kid heads they thought they’d have to explain how it happened and get in trouble. Ruth can remember Magda’s bathtub with the blood and the water and the piece of gravel circling down the drain. There was Mrs. Warren, beautiful with her hair coming undone, making everything safe again. She’d taken the pebble out with the sharp part of a toenail file and put Mercurochrome on the cut. But Ruth just honestly doesn’t know whether the stone was in her knee or Magda’s. She’ll ask, and Magda will roll her eyes and tell her the answer. Magda acts like everything is as obvious as the color of the sky. Even when she doesn’t know the answer, she rolls her eyes like you’re stupid for not knowing she wouldn’t know.